


Neapolitan ice-cream

by Florchis



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Agents of SHIELD Rarepair Fic Exchange, Fluff, Getting Together, Ice Cream Parlors, Long Live Feedback Comment Project, Multi, Polyamory, Polyamory Negotiations, Strangers to Friends to Lovers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-17
Updated: 2020-03-17
Packaged: 2021-03-01 05:22:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,101
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23189913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Florchis/pseuds/Florchis
Summary: Fitz only wanted to end his shift at the ice-cream shop, until a girl enters asking for a vanilla cone and trails inside a book and another girl that will change his life.
Relationships: Leo Fitz/Jemma Simmons/Skye | Daisy Johnson
Comments: 24
Kudos: 30
Collections: (I'll stop the world and) Melt with you {Romantic Fitzskimmons}





	Neapolitan ice-cream

**Author's Note:**

  * For [theclaravoyant](https://archiveofourown.org/users/theclaravoyant/gifts).



> For @theclaravoyant for the Rarepair Exchange! The prompt was "coffee shop AU with a twist". Hope you enjoy it ❤❤❤

When the bell on top of the door rings, Fitz curses under his breath. This sticky spot in the middle of the counter is being particularly difficult, and he is three minutes away from being done with his shift. He can only pray that whoever just entered the parlor is not looking to take away enough ice cream to feed an army. He tries to smooth down the scowl of his features before looking up- he can hear his aunt clearly inside his head,  _ nobody likes a grumpypants, Leopold, and it will give wrinkles on top of that _ . 

He is glad he went the extra mile when in front of him he finds the prettiest girl with the cheeriest smile.

“Hi! I’m Jemma. Do you think I can get a vanilla cone?”

_ Who introduces themselves when ordering a cone _ , is what he truly wants to ask, but instead, he shifts to the regular business smile, “Coming right up.”

The girl bounces on the sole of her feet while money exchanges hands, and she even leans a little over the counter to watch him while he gets the cone and places carefully first one and then another vanilla scoop on it. It usually annoys him when customers turn a hawk eye to the way he does his job- no matter how smart they believe they are, they will never know how to do this better than him, that does it dozens of times a day. But this…  _ Jemma  _ doesn’t look judgemental, only curious, and Fitz lets her be. The joke will be on her if he missed a spot on the counter and she gets a stain in that lovely summer dress of hers, anyway.

“Here you go.”

“Thank you so much.” She smiles at him warmly and the cynical part of his brain wants to dismiss the entire exchange entirely, but she is so honest about it all that he can’t help but blush a little.

She sits down on one of the small tables inside the shop, and Fitz moves to the corner to take off his apron and his hat and check that he is leaving everything as it should be before Ethan takes over. Tidiness might not be his best quality, but nobody could say that he doesn’t pay attention to detail in his job.

And then the strangest thing happens. Because he turns around and the girl has taken out of her backpack a thick tome on gravitational fields, and she is nose deep in it (well, luckily not literally, considering that there is a smear of vanilla ice-cream on the tip of her nose that she hadn’t noticed). Fitz flies to the book like a moth to a flame, incapable of resisting its gravitational pull- pun intended.

He stretches his hand wanting to trace the letters on the cover, but realizes how weird that would be and retreats quickly. But not quickly enough to not make Jemma raise her head.

“Can I help you with something, Fitz?”

He is confused for a second until he remembers that he didn’t take off his nametag.

“Yeah, you have ice-cream in your nose.” That is so not what he wanted to say. Jemma’s cheeks redden quickly while she covers half her face with a hand, and Fitz trips over himself to deviate the attention from her little mishap. “Sorry, I meant… where did you get this?” He taps his fingers against the cover of the book, gives her time to clean herself. “I need this for school and I couldn’t score a copy anywhere!”

Her eyes light up at the mention of school and Fitz almost sighs- catastrophe averted.

“Are you in Dr. Hall’s class for this fall?”

“Yeah? Are you-?”

“Yes!”

Just as he suspected, talking with this girl is like opening a dam; by the time he remembers himself, they have talked about their respective academic lives and the Ph.D.’s they are getting- his first, Jemma’s second- and their dream jobs and everything in between.

“If you want, I can take you to the hole-in-the-wall used bookstore where I got this- getting there is a nightmare, so giving you an address would be pointless.”

“Yeah, that sounds great.” And that’s when he realizes that roughly a half-hour has passed, and Ethan still hasn’t shown up. He checks his phone and bites down the temptation to curse out loud. “Sorry, but I can’t. My coworker is running late and he won’t be here for another half hour.” 

Jemma shrugs. “That’s okay. I can stay and wait for you.” Her nose wiggles nervously and she adds in a lower voice, “I could even read to you? So you start catching up?” Fitz doesn’t have time to reply, but his face-splitting grin seems to be everything she needs to spur her on. “You know, as long as you pay me back with my weight in ice-cream!” 

* * *

After that first one, it’s rare the day Jemma doesn’t come to the shop at all. What attracts her is a powerful combination of Fitz’s aunt liking her very much, and both her and Fitz shamelessly feeding her free ice-cream, with an extra on top of him being there, he likes to believe. She comes to the shop, they talk out of their ears, he teaches her how to serve a perfect scoop and Jemma reads to him- he has already gotten a copy of his own with her help, but, well. She does have a lovely voice.

After three weeks of the same routine, Fitz is used to it and looking forward to seeing her every day, until Jemma sends everything crashing down on top of him. She enters the shop, happier than she has ever seen her, and makes a beeline for the counter… dragging a confused girl behind her.

“Hey, Fitz!” By now he is well acquainted with Jemma’s over-enthusiasm, but even this is a tad too much. “I want you to meet my girlfriend! This is Daisy!”

“What’s up? So you are the infamous Fitz, hmm? I have heard a lot about you.” 

Only then Fitz focuses on their intertwined hands that Jemma is raising to eye-level. His heart falls to the ground, or rather, the cone he was already making for Jemma does.

He gives that Daisy person a robotic nod as all form of acknowledgment, and kneels down to clean the floor so they can’t see his face while he replies, “Why don’t you guys find a seat? I will be with you in a jiffy.”

He tries very hard to school his face into some semblance of a smile while he walks to their table with the two cones- Jemma had paid for two, including one with chocolate peanut butter for Daisy, and this time Fitz didn’t even refuse her money. It’s not easy, not when he didn’t know that Jemma had a girlfriend at all (he can imagine why she didn’t tell him right away; it hurts a little, but he gets it). In a way, it makes sense: this lovely, kind, smart girl that likes the same things as him and goes to the same school as him? Too good to be true. Either she had to be unavailable or a figment of his imagination. He likes this outcome better, all things considered.

They are whispering with their forefronts almost touching, and he almost falters on his step; if his aunt hadn’t shushed away to make him go hang out with his “friend” (yes, she did use the air quotes and everything), he would have come back to the counter with their ice-creams. But this is the music that is playing, Fitz, and there is no way around it: you need to face it.

He clears his throat, and Jemma moves apart from Daisy quickly, almost like she got caught doing something she shouldn’t. Daisy, instead, looks at him with intense eyes but makes a friendly gesture telling him to come closer.

“A vanilla cone for Jemma, a chocolate peanut butter for… Daisy, is it?”

“Daisy, yes.” She grabs her cone and looks at him with a frown. “You didn’t get one for yourself? Come on, I will go to the counter with you and you can teach me how to serve a perfect scoop the way you taught Jemma.”

He almost claims that he isn’t hungry, but Jemma knows him enough to be able to claim bullshit on that; besides, Daisy is already standing and waiting for him to lead the way.

This Daisy gal knows what she is doing because, by the time they get back to the table, he is feeling much better about the whole situation. He is realizing that Daisy is cool, and Jemma deserves someone that cool and that it should be enough that this lovely, kind, smart girl wants to be his friend. He is going to make that be enough.

(The sugar also helps.) 

* * *

The girls start coming as a fixed unit, and as days pass by, Fitz realizes that he stopped pretending he was okay with it… to actually be okay with the whole thing. It’s a whole routine now: they come near the end of his shift, and they sit always on the same table with their cream-and-brown matching cones, Daisy on her laptop, Jemma with her crazy color-coded notebooks, sometimes holding hands under the table. 

Fitz joins them right after his shift, and they usually indulge Jemma on talk-shop for half an hour or two before Daisy starts tugging on her sleeves to take this conversation outside. They take ice-cream for the way, and while they walk to the park or the riverside or some other nature-centric place Daisy likes, he usually gets caught up in a conversation with Daisy about coding or superhero movies or how they would survive on a zombie apocalypse. Sometimes the girls hold hands and Fitz walks a step ahead, partly to not embarrass them with his staring, partly to keep an eye out for trouble (Daisy is, without a doubt, stronger and scarier than he is, but still). Sometimes, instead, they both link arms with him, and they talk to him at the same time or about him to each other and, honestly, being talked about has never been sweeter.

* * *

One Tuesday a month and a half in, he is halfway into making Jemma’s cone when he looks around and sees that only Daisy is sitting down in their usual table with her laptop. 

“Jemma running late?”

Daisy looks him in the eye for a long time before replying, “No. Jemma can not make it today.”

Fitz blinks. Daisy is all neutral faced, and the ice-cream is starting to melt on his hand and boy, why didn’t he thought that this would obviously end in a disaster?

“What am I going to do with this half-cone of vanilla, then?” He shakes off a drop of ice cream from his fingers and tries to come across as funny, but sounds whiny instead.

Daisy licks her lips.

“We could share it.” There is an intense quality to her that is unlike her usual self. Fitz doesn’t dislike it per se, but he dreads what it could possibly mean for him; he is not sure if she is just focused or if she is about to unload a terrible truth on him.

“Okay.” 

He grabs a couple of plastic spoons, sits down on the usual table and gives her one of the spoons. Daisy takes a mini portion to her mouth and moves it around her mouth like she is in a wine tasting. When she finally swallows, it’s like a thousand years have passed in Fitz’s mind. She looks at him again, and sweat breaks on the nape of his neck.

“On the count of three,” she begins, and Fitz almost jumps on his seat after being in silence for so long, “favorite Harry Potter book. One, two, three, go!”

(They don’t agree on it, but he starts to believe they might be okay.)

* * *

It’s the last Saturday before classes begin, and his aunt had no better idea than to call in a panic asking him to go check if she left the shop’s back door closed. It could be worse, Fitz supposes. School is going to be a hindrance in that lovely blooming relationship he was forming with the girls, and he can use one last look at the shop to reminiscence and be melancholic about it at his own pace.

Except the back door of the shop is, indeed, open.

He dials 9-1 on his phone and keeps a finger on the screen while he pushes the door open.

Of all the many things he wasn’t expecting to find inside the shop, Daisy smiling with her hands behind her back just after crossing the door was probably very low on that list. He drops his phone and almost trips over his own legs out of surprise.

“Bloody hell, Daisy, are you trying to kill me?”

She hides her smile behind her hand and extends her other one to him.

“Not yet, at least.”

He follows her inside, still dumbfounded. Even in the middle of his surprise, he can’t help noticing how warm and nice her hand is. But the mysteries don’t end there, because all the tables of the saloon have been pushed towards the walls, and one table is sitting in the middle-  _ their  _ table, he notices, because the paint on one of its legs is chipped- with three chairs. On top of the table, a wafer basket with ice cream and three candles. On one of the chairs, Jemma. 

Since Daisy didn’t give him, anything resembling a straight answer, he addresses the other girl. “Jemma, what is going on?”

But Jemma doesn’t reply either, just makes a flourish with her hand to signal him to sit down. With Daisy tugging on his hand, he can’t do much but comply. Jemma pushes a spoon his way the moment he is seated, and with her other hand, she searches for Daisy’s. 

“Okay, you two need to explain to me what is going on with this strange… rendezvous of yours.”

“Wait, this isn’t a date?”

“Daisy!” Jemma scolds her, and Fitz chokes. 

“Too soon? It was too soon.” Daisy pouts, but Jemma ignores her and signals the ice-cream to him.

“Fitz, the ice-cream is melting.”

He pushes the spoon inside the wafer basket in automatic, just to have something to do with his idle hands. The candlelight prevents him from seeing the colors clearly, and when he takes the spoon to his mouth he tastes both chocolate and vanilla.

“Fitz-,” Jemma starts again, but Daisy interrupts her almost immediately.

“Fitz, I am gonna ask you a question, and I need you to be honest with me, okay?”

“We agreed I was going to tell him,” Jemma mutters, outraged.

Daisy turns around to her, and Fitz is reminded of the many times they have done this in the past, having half conversations he can’t keep up with, but instead of dread this time it fills him with fondness.

“I know, babe, but to-the-point explanations are not exactly your forte.”

“I had a metaphor prepared!” 

“Proving my point exactly.” Daisy turns back to Fitz, and he straightens his back. “So, Fitz. Question. Do you promise to be honest about it?”

“Hm, yes?” He doesn’t even have time to be fully conscious about what he is promising that Daisy fires back at him,

“Before you knew that Jemma has a girlfriend, weren’t you meaning to ask her out?”

He chokes on his tongue, and Jemma produces a pitch of water from nowhere and shoots daggers Daisy’s way while she pours him a glass.

“Babe, we agreed on not scaring him!”

Daisy raises her hands in the air, feigning innocence. 

“It was a honest to god question!”

His breathing is still wheezing, and Jemma is gently patting his back while Fitz tries to find his words to reply. “I don’t… I would never dare… I…” But Daisy is looking him straight in the eyes, and there is something about her eyes that pierce through his soul. He can’t lie to her. He doesn’t  _ want  _ to lie to her. “Yes.” 

Daisy pumps her fist in the air.

“See? Told ya.”

“But that doesn’t mean I-,” he rushes to explain himself, tripping over his words, and Daisy stops him with a hand in the air.

“We are cool, Fitz. I mean, I can not blame you. This one is a catch.”

“You are a catch too,” he blurts out. Embarrassed by his slip-out, he looks for something to do with his hands. Daisy is looking at him like the cat that got the cream, and he eats another spoonful of ice-cream just to have an excuse to not talk anymore. This time he gets strawberry. His favorite. 

“Jems, I think we are ready for your metaphor now.”

“Right, okay.” Fitz directs his eyes back at Jemma, and even in the candlelight, it’s obvious her cheeks are flushed. He doesn’t understand why when he is the only one that should be embarrassed by this whole situation, but he is not bringing any attention to his imminent misery. “You know how I like vanilla ice cream and Daisy likes chocolate, right?” He nods. Of course he knows. “They are both great on their own. They don’t need each other. But they compliment each other. And they taste great together.”

The sound of Jemma’s voice is hypnotizing. He is turning the spoon around in his fingers, unable to stop looking at her, except for when Daisy picks up Jemma’s explanation.

“And you know what we think is the only thing better than chocolate and vanilla ice-cream? Neapolitan ice-cream.”

A beat. Two. They are holding hands on top of the table, looking at him with big, hopeful eyes, a waffle basket filled with melting ice-cream in between them, and it takes Fitz A Moment to understand what they are trying to tell him. It’s almost surreal to him that these funny, smart, gorgeous girls that have something amazing going on are willing to open their arms to let him in. And yet here they are, and he would be a fool to not give himself the opportunity to at least try. 

He places his shaky hand on top of theirs, and somehow that alone is enough to make himself feel more peaceful.

“I have never had it before,” he whispers, and his voice is timid but the feeling is strong. “Maybe we can try it all together.” 

**Author's Note:**

> This fills the "Wait, this isn't a date?" square in my [ Marvel Polyship Bingo Cad.](https://florchis.tumblr.com/post/189650837251/currently-taking-prompts-for-this-just-remember) I'm accepting prompts for it on[ my Tumblr](http://florchis.tumblr.com/ask) or here!  
> *  
> This story is part of LLF Comment Project, whose goal is to improve communication between readers and authors. This author invites:
> 
>   * Short comments
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> This author replies to comments (but it might take a while). If you'd rather not get a reply, please add *whispers* to your comment.



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